Which part of the conductor's body conveys most expressive information? A spatial occlusion approach
Wöllner, C. (2008). Which part of the conductor's body conveys most expressive information? A spatial occlusion approach. Musicae Scientiae, 12(2), 249-272.
Authors
Date
2008Access restrictions
This study investigated the perception of conductors' body movements under different viewing conditions with a multi-modal within-subjects design. Five conductors with different levels of experience each conducted four excerpts from a Beethoven symphony that varied in musical expressiveness. Video recordings were manipulated according to three occlusion conditions: a) only the face was visible, b) only the arms were visible and c) the whole body was visible in simulated peripheral vision. 127 musically trained or untrained participants first watched, without sound, randomly presented video sequences according to these conditions. For each sequence, they were asked to rate affective and communicative items. Complete video sequences with sound were then presented as a reference and rated similarly. Video sequences that presented the conductors' faces resembled the reference significantly better than the arms-only or the peripheral conditions in terms of expressiveness ratings. Sequences showing the arms were judged higher in amount of information. For the movements of all conductors, clear interpretation differences between the four musical excerpts appeared even for conditions without sound. Differences between conductors were related to their general affective behaviour and to evaluations of four conducting experts. The findings generally highlight the importance of facial affective behaviour for expressive conducting.
...


Metadata
Show full item recordCollections
Related items
Showing items with similar title or keywords.
-
Interaction of sight and sound in the perception and experience of musical performance
Vuoskoski, Jonna K.; Thompson, Marc; Spence, Charles; Clarke, Eric F. (University of California Press, 2016)Recently, Vuoskoski, Thompson, Clarke, and Spence (2014) demonstrated that visual kinematic performance cues may be more important than auditory performance cues in terms of observers’ ratings of expressivity perceived in ... -
Top-Down Predictions of Familiarity and Congruency in Audio-Visual Speech Perception at Neural Level
Kolozsvári, Orsolya B.; Xu, Weiyong; Leppänen, Paavo H. T.; Hämäläinen, Jarmo A. (Frontiers Media, 2019)During speech perception, listeners rely on multimodal input and make use of both auditory and visual information. When presented with speech, for example syllables, the differences in brain responses to distinct stimuli ... -
Event-related potentials to task-irrelevant changes in facial expressions
Astikainen, Piia; Hietanen, Jari K. (2009)Abstract Background Numerous previous experiments have used oddball paradigm to study change detection. This paradigm is ... -
Event-related potentials to unattended changes in facial expressions: detection of regularity violations or encoding of emotions?
Astikainen, Piia; Cong, Fengyu; Ristaniemi, Tapani; Hietanen, Jari K. (Frontiers, 2013)Visual mismatch negativity (vMMN), a component in event-related potentials (ERPs), can be elicited when rarely presented “deviant” facial expressions violate regularity formed by repeated “standard” faces. vMMN is observed ... -
Brain's change detection elicited by emotional facial expressions in depressed and non-depressed individuals
Hannikainen, Kirsti (2009)